Atari has a special place in my heart. The Atari 2600 was the first console I owned, paid for in part by the proceeds of a paper route I had when I was 10 or 11, and it contributed much to my lifelong love of videogames. I’m saddened to note this story on joystiq about Atari’s most recent death.

One of the early, truly great online shooters was the Quake engine derived ‘quakeworld,’ and it lives on to this day thanks to Id’s practice of opening the source code of their game engines to the public once their commercial lifespan ends. There are many quakeworld ‘distros’ these days, and much work has been done to bring it into the modern graphical age with better lighting, texturing and so on. None is easier to get going than nquake though, and it’s this weeks friday fun link. This runs on basically every platform known to man, but do be aware that you need pak1 from the original commercial quake release to play. You can score it unbelievably cheaply if you don’t already have it sitting around from back in the day or on the DVD for Quake IV. You can even score it off of Steam for ~ $10.

Sonic FA is another asian shmup, this one from the curtain fire school of design, with great pixelicious graphics and an absolutely brutal difficulty level. It’s otherwise pretty conventional in design – kill ships to get powerups to upgrade your shot power, blast everything in site whilst avoiding the bullet storm. Fun, if frustrating, and a worthy friday fun link. Since the homepage is in japanese, some clues – use your arrow keys to move, and the z and x keys to fire your guns and missiles. Here’s a direct download link as well. Oh, and windows only, sorry mac and linux folk.

[via]

I finished the latest episode of Halflife 2 this weekend. Overall I’d give it a B. It’s got the same solid Halflife 2 production values and the engine still looks great, and there’s one significant gameplay element added, a gravity gun launched sticky bomb that has to be set off with a pistol to deal with a certain situation. Honestly though beyond that HalfLife 2 is beginning to feel a bit stale. The story is still engaging, and ends in such a way that leaves me wanting to know/play more, but for the most part this pak feels like a rehash, with the same sort of situations we’ve seen in Halflife 2 before, differentiated by being set in new level geometry or featuring a different character or a new weapon. Also I’m starting to get aggravated with a couple of longstanding Source engine bugs – the sound stuttering bug (I mean

In the 80’s, there was the arcade game Wizards of Wor, and the teenagers did say ‘it was very good.’ But in the 90’s the arcades did die off, and the arcade gamers from the 80’s did say unto the lord ‘woe is us, for the youngins do play games of great complexity and less fun!’ And the lord of arcade fun did hear their prayers, and in the 2000’s he caused to be a resurgence of fan made classic arcade game remixes and remakes, and the arcade gamers of the 80’s rejoiced, and did play many, and fun was had. But still, there was no longer a Wizards of Wor, and the arcade fans of the 80’s did wish there would be one. And lo, Dave discovered that there WAS one, and he linked to it in his blog. And there was much rejoicing and blasting of demons with laser blasters by all.

[link courtesy of indygamer, quixotic tone courtesy of my mood. Game for windows only, tiny download, great meticulously crafted pixelicious graphics, difficult to master controls. Check it out]

Admit it – doesn’t this look like fun?

(~3 minutes, footage of various carnage in Crackdown, an Xbox 360 game)

It was. Crackdown was excellent. It’s a 3rd person action game set in a dystopian future city where you’re a genetically altered supercop out to put the smackdown on the gangs that have run amok in the city. The city itself is fantastic – it’s huge, diverse, detailed, populated with tons of people wandering and driving about, and graphically it looks great. The game is free form – aside from some hand holding in the beginning you’re basically free to do as you please, exploring, fighting wandering thugs, and seeking out gangleader hideouts as you see fit. Your skills increase as you use them, so for example in the beginning you can only jump about 10 feet, and by the end you can leap about like a bionic jackrabbit superhero. The core mechanics of running, fighting, shooting, jumping and climbing are really solid and really fun, so much so that even though I’ve solved the game I’ve still been playing it a bit, continuing to explore the nooks and crannies of the huge city. It’s not all perfect – enemy AI is poor, which is especially obvious when you fight the bosses, and the driving is ok but much less compelling than the other gameplay mechanics. Still, the game is a solid, engaging A level game and well worth a look, especially since you can get it dirt cheap – my copy was only $13 shipped from an ebay seller.

It’s also got coop which I haven’t tried yet but which I intend to if I can only manage to convince my buddy Trevor to pick up a copy.

Ingredients:

• 1 or more gamers raised on old school 80’s twitch arcade games
• 1 Playstation 3
• 1 2 stick/8 way shooter incorporating awesome guitar rock soundtrack cleverly integrated into the gameplay, 8 bit generation inspired but modern sensibility informed graphics, and novel scoring mechanic.

Download game from psn store, and play, play, play. Details:

(translation: Everyday Shooter is absolutely fantastic. I’ve gotten more mileage out of 8 way shooters on my PS3 than any other form of entertainment on the thing. $9.99, and no one who has a PS3 should pass this up. Even if you don’t have a ps3, watch the video. Road trips to my house will follow.)

Halflife 2 is a classic first person shooter – witness the reviews on metacritic and gamerankings.com by way of example. Valve’s recent release of episode 2 for halflife 2 was only available as part of a bundle that also included the original halflife 2 and episode 1 expansion pak for it. This was kind of stupid for a lot of folks including me, since we already owned these, but Valve’s made it possible to ‘gift’ these licenses to someone else. So. If you want a free copy of halflife 2 and the first expansion pak, speak up in the comments. This is PC only. The hardware requirements are relatively modest since Halflife 2 is several years old now, though if you’ve got a recent machine it still looks great because they’ve been continually improving the engine.

Yeah, so Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition was announced this spring, which is interesting in and of itself, I suppose, if you’re still playing pen and paper RPGs, but what’s more interesting is the whispers of online functionality, gaming portals, subscriptions services and more that have been swirling about since the spring. I hadn’t been paying much attention, but today I noticed this video showing some of the functionality of their new services (~5 minute youtube video below – fast forward about a minute and a half to see the online stuff):

Color me intrigued. Details are still scanty, but a toolset that takes care of modeling the mechanics of combat, in 3d? Awesome! I don’t know who I’d actually be able to play with, but my love of tactical combat knows no bounds. There are other toolsets out there for the pen and paper rpg crowd, but nothing I’m aware of comes close to this in terms of presentation, and presumably it will be populated with the complete catalog of DnD material, something no other toolset has or can come close to. Supposedly this stuff is going to be available in spring of ’08. I’ll be watching to see how it plays out.[via]

So you’re a little girl in a dress.. no, don’t bail, stay with me here. You’re a little girl in a dress flying through an undefined space, assaulted on all sides by geometric shapes. The good news is you can fend off the assault by drawing lines through things with the stick of chalk you’re armed with, using your mouse to draw.

If that premise doesn’t grab you (and honestly, who could resist it?) I’ll also note that Chalk is fun, cute, and clever both in premise and gameplay mechanic implementation. This is windows only,